Welcome to the PLOS Paleo network!

For those not into Twitter and Facebook, you might have missed the recent launch of the new PLOS Paleo network! PLOS is an open access publisher, and the overall aim is to combine access to published scientific articles with community-driven communication of that research. Which I think is pretty awesome, as you have both specialist and non-specialist accessibility covered then, and communicated from within the research community. This is a far superior mode of communication for me over the mass media (often incorrect or missing key context/information), papers themselves (language barriers), Twitter (too brief), or popular sites like ‘I Fucking Love Science’ et al., where often content is littered with hyperbole, spin, and forced ‘sex appeal’ rather than a true appreciation of the actual research.

Sophie the Stegosaurus, recently published in PLOS ONE, and covered by the Paleo network!

Within just a month or two of launching, the PLOS Paleo network, comprising Andy Farke, Sarah Gibson, and myself, has released several articles about the latest research in Palaeontology, as well as attended a conference in Dallas where we received a warm welcome from the research community! Select articles so far include:

Robert Gay, one of our guest tweeters at SVP and author of the Dilophosaurus post, posing with the beast!

What you might notice about these articles is that they’re not exactly the kinds of things that get covered in the broader or more popular media. However, what they represent are scientifically interesting, and perhaps more importantly, significant steps forward, that tend to receive less overall coverage because of a perceived lack of ‘sexiness’. The network is only just getting off the ground, but I hope you see that it is a fairly novel approach to communicating research, and find some of what we write about informative and interesting!